Yeah, a thread about a thermostat.

Company web site: http://nest.com (I wonder how much they paid for the domain?)

News at Engadget: http://www.engadget.com/2011/10/25/ipod-fathers-unveil-their-next-project-the-nest-learning-thermo/

This is an "intelligent" WiFi thermostat. Unfortunately, my most pressing questions aren't answered in any of the previews or marketing materials... So I wrote them an email to ask.



With HRV I'd like to stop using a secondary controller and integrate into one unit - that would also give WiFi access to HRV which is thing that received the most manual adjustment.

Humidifier is currently controlled via its own controller mounted near the HVAC equipment in the basement. This type of controller needs to also know the temperature outside (via sensor) so it can add humidity to ambient without creating condensation on the windows (calculating dew point based on outside temperature)

Typical thermostats either have an ON/AUTO setting for the blower fan on forced air systems. The fan will come on during heating and cooling cycles and turn itself off when the cycle is done or isn't running. However, for higher efficiency in maintaining a balanced ambient temperature throughout the house, it's a good idea to keep the fan running at all times along with all your interior/room doors open. This keeps the whole house at a similar temperature and keeps air flowing. The issue is that the fan produces noise. Being able to schedule the fan during the off-cycle periods would be ideal. Some high end thermostats have this ability.

The main thing I want to know is where in the blue blazes they found a circular LCD, and why couldn't we find one when we were making the Vibez?

Peter

Wait...what?

Room doors. Sorry, I forgot to edit that earlier when I was cutting and pasting. The idea is to keep air moving around the house to keep the temperature as stabilized as possible, because some rooms will naturally be colder than others, given the construction of the house and location of the room.

(Interior doors)

Poked around a bit more on their site:






By playing around with the buttons on their compatibility checker I also learned they're "putting the final touches on" a Nest Thermostat+ which will, among other things, support multi-stage. Don't know anything else about it though.

It didn't exist until 2007?

Hmph, good answer!

Peter

What makes you so sure it's a circular LCD, and not just a square LCD with circular bezel over top of it?

The pictures in the link?

I must admit that learning over a 7 day period, sounds to me, like a completely stupid implementation. I suppose it's great for people that are slow (a few cards short of a full deck), but seriously, if they're this proud of their design skills they should have implemented something that could be set up in 5 minutes by anyone.

I love the design and I love the WiFi. But I don't make adjustments to my thermostat 1500 times per year like the cavemen they obviously surveyed for their stats. Pretty much I leave a set temperature for the winter and a different one for the summer. When we didn't have a baby/toddler in the house I had separate night time temperatures, but it's not feasible right now to drop the temperature too low at night with the little one constantly uncovering herself while asleep.

I see a bunch of other randomly useful things with this. Since it's got some kind of motion sensor in it, you could turn it into a makeshift security system.

Since I'm part of the apparently small minority of people who know how to program a thermostat, I don't expect it would save me a lot of money, but I'd probably still buy it for all the other neato features, like being able to pull our your phone when you're heading home early from work and have the air ready by the time you get home.

As to the 7-day learning thing, I'd probably never have the patience for that. I'd just pre-program it with the same schedule that I programmed into our current thermostat and then let it do its automatic adjustments from there.

How dare they try to cater to the majority of the market and start with a whole new approach! ;-)

I see a lot of possibilities with this. My schedule is not fixed, so a fixed schedule thermostat is not the most efficient for my needs. There are trends in my schedule, and if this thing is smart enough to figure them out, it's one less task I have to think about, while still gaining benefits. What would be really cool is to tie it into the iPhone geofencing abilities with iOS 5. Interconnected, the thermostat at home could know when I'm headed that direction outside the normal trends and ensure the house is at a comfortable level. Extremely useful for the painfully hot Austin summers, where I tended to shut down my AC system completely during the day.

I'm all for a new take on thermostats. It's funny, over the past month I've actually been looking for thermostats that work over Z-Wave or WiFi, but all the current products out there are pretty terrible, or they cost a good deal more than the Nest but with half the features and a quarter the style (not that the look of it is my biggest priority).

I really would prefer that it NOT have the learning capabilities. That's not very useful to me, since I work from home a lot of the time, and so I'm in and out of the house at completely different times from day to day. But being able to adjust the thermostat over WiFi would be great. I'm also interested in learning more about how each Nest talks to each other.

My home is VERY difficult to work with when it comes to temperature control (I've posted a thread about it here before). We have two floors, with a thermostat on the first floor, and duct work in-between the levels. This is an awful design. It means that there's almost no way to keep the top floor cool. In the summer, the AC cools until the first floor is cool, which means the top floor stays warm, even when I close all the vents on the first floor and open the ones on the second. In the winter, even though I flip the vents, because the ceilings are so high, it takes a while for the heat to reach the thermostat on the wall, and the top floor fills from the vents on the ground. Again, it's a terrible design. It's taken me four years to finally get things to the point where I've kind of figured it out. But there's still problems, and the second floor continues to be 3-4 degrees hotter than the first at almost all times.

What I'd love is a system that would know to trust a thermostat on the second floor when we went to bed, and the first floor the rest of the time. But at the very least, if I was having trouble sleeping because it was too hot on the second floor, it would be nice to use an app to turn the temp down without going downstairs (first world problems).

That would be pretty cool. Because as it stands, to "program" the remote automatically over the 7 day period, you have to go make manual adjustments to it multiple times per day. If you don't, forget, etc. then it's going to be set incorrectly. I suppose it will eventually correct itself, but how many week do you want to go and keep making manual adjustments?



Around these parts, that's standard, and it's exactly that way for some 99% of homes.

If you found other thermostats lacking, perhaps you didn't see the Honeywell Prestige 2.0 IAQ:

http://yourhome.honeywell.com/home/Produ...fort+System.htm

It requires a number of doo-dads, but once they're connected, you have WiFi, app control from phones, outside temp and humidity, inside humidity control, ventilation control, more advanced control of the blower fan as I want, and more. You can install additional sensors and it will average (by default) the temperatures from the different sampling locations. I suspect you should be able to override this to get it to respond to one specific sensor.

I'm pretty sure another one of the WiFi products, maybe that Bee one I can't remember the name for right now, had separate control and monitoring sensors. So you could move the sensor to sample ambient elsewhere, while keeping the control module where the wires are.

There's only so much a thermostat can do however to overcome a poorly designed HVAC system. In a bigger home you'd have multiple furnaces and air conditioning units to service different parts of the home, allowing better control of each zone.

Maybe up in your parts, but not in the homes I've lived in, and even if you're right, that doesn't mean it's a good design. IMO, it's the worst possible design for heating a home, particularly one with high ceilings, and at least as far as even temperature distribution goes.

The Wired article says:


Given that these are former Apple people, you know they've got apps on the brain. The big question is whether they just expose an API or whether they try to create an "ecosystem" that they control. It's easy to see a variety of sophisticated uses.

My guess is that somebody like Honeywell offers them a scandalously large amount of money and they promptly get sucked in.

One more factoid: Nest originally set themselves up to sell direct to the consumer or via BestBuy. The demand apparently crushed their web site this morning, and now store.nest.com redirects to bestbuy.com.

Matt, I didn't say it was ideal. In terms of design, there are a lot of fine points in the implementation and it's possible that with two different installations, in one home it works well and in another it doesn't, even if both homes feature the same floor plan and ceilings.

Just in case I misunderstood, the "typical" system I'm describing here has the furnace and AC coil ("the furnace") is in the basement and the AC evaporator somewhere outside. With basement ducts and 1st floor ducts in the basement ceiling. Then second floor ducts in the 1st floor ceiling. That means heat/cool come to the first and second floors via vents in each respective floor. This is what I understood that you were describing about your own system.

There's a lot more to efficiency and performance than just throwing a furnace and some duct work into a house.

Many, but not all, the homes in my current sub-division have employed a twist on this standard design. These are homes that were built in a factory and transported in one piece to the foundation. Theyre also designed to be Energy Star compliant. For the top floor, a central wide duct comes up from the basement all the way to the attic. Branch ducts then go to each room and vent in through the ceiling. All the ductwork in the attic is incased in 1.5 feet of expanded polyurethane spray foam (it's solid, you can walk on the stuff).

It's working reasonably well, though I am careful about which vents to leave open and which to close to move air around and create a stable/even temperature. The top floor doesn't vary from the first by more than 1-1.5 degrees. The exception is one room on the top floor that has a large bay window, in which the temps can rise significantly because of all the sun that enters. Plantation shutters takes care of that fairly well, along with keeping the fan on to move air around throughout the house.

Having some type of automated baffle system that could control airflow to individual parts of the house would be pretty cool, but I've never heard of such a thing being installed in a residence. That would be a neat way to direct airflow without requiring multiple furnaces or AC units.

Not surprising considering the amount of coverage they're getting. The clever circular LCD and jog shuttle approach are attention grabbers.

It'll be interesting to see what kind of reply I get to my email query from this AM.

There are inflatable bladder systems that you can retrofit in residential systems fairly easily. It involves running pneumatic tubing inside the ductwork from the ducts to a central point where they are attached to a computer controlled manifold. At the duct end, the tubing is attached to inflatable bladders that are secured near the end of the duct with a framework. The manifold can then inflate the bladders to block airflow to that duct. The tubes are run with the use of a big fan, blocking all the ducts but the one you're dealing with, a long piece of string, and a small "parachute".

Damn, sounds like a fine idea. Any links?

The pictures don't show a dismantled view.

The way I see it, the top is domed, so unless the LCD is also curved to fit that dome radius, it can't sit flush with the top of the thermostat. If it's offset, then the LCD can be larger than the actual area of the circular visible display. If it's larger, then the LCD itself could easily be square, with circular masking, no?

It looks to me like the LCD is circular and that the fascia around the LCD is beveled. This bevel would preclude or make it very difficult to use a non-circular LCD. This wouldn't be the first product using a circular LCD.

Bitt, that looks amazing, thanks for the link - saving it for future reference. They estimate pricing at between $3 and $5 per sqft of the home. Kind of pricy for a retrofit, so I wonder if that's estimated to include installation.

It is square, with a round bezel. Real round ones exist, but they cost.

Disclosure: I worked on that product too

I imagine it does, since they don't seem to sell to the consumer. I don't know why they would price it that way, though. Seems like there should be a pretty set parts cost.

I almost added to my previous post "That's the way I'd do it, because it's certainly cheaper than a round LCD, improving my profit margin."

Maybe if I used one it would end up being great but I agree with Bruno that having it learn my patterns would be silly. I just would want programmable so I can set the temps change whenever I want and have it store a winter set and a summer set. After I get the program setup I don't really change it.

I think it's funny to see coverage of a thermostat on tech websites